Introduction to video marketing part 4: A look at success

Introduction to video marketing part 4: A look at success

Video is a necessary tool that allows you to enhance and showcase some very important parts of your business in a simple, personal, and interesting way. In the Dollar Shave Club example (mentioned in the previous post), their video was instrumental in the simplicity of the website. It gave us all the information we needed ($1 a month for razors) to sell us on the product. They also knew their audience very well – this helped craft the video’s blatant and honest information, by giving us facts quickly and poking fun at all the fluff used in similar marketing videos. Social media’s roles should be driving customers to the website in order to complete the sale, and also generating interest after a good experience. I was more than happy to get on Facebook, write a quick review, and share my experience after I received my first package of razors. Take a look at their Facebook or Twitter pages and you’ll see I’m not the only one who has done this. Posts such as these have an immeasurable value in creating new leads and generating traffic.

Here’s the caveat: you MUST have a quality product or service that people want. The marketplace today is saturated with nearly every niche you can imagine. Look at one magazine rack and you’ll notice how every single one caters to a very specific audience. Not everyone buys Gun & Ammo, Cat Fancy, and Cosmo. These companies know their audiences, make it easy for them to get the information, and are providing quality services to them. If your niche is already filled, if your product doesn’t have a niche, or you’re not absolutely sure who your audience is then go back to square one and reevaluate what you’re offering. What makes you different from your competitors and everyone else? (We’ll take a look at how to ask and answer this question, and where to go once you do, in part 5 of this post).

A great example (within an example) is Netflix. Netflix caters to a specific audience that wants to watch TV shows and movies in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, and at a time that they dictate. They have since dropped their ill-named and even iller-executed DVD rental program Qwikster and moved on to the even more niched market of online streaming. Within Netflix is where the real magic happens though. For those of you who aren’t aware, Netflix has a massive library of movies and TV shows to watch. You can find standard genres like Comedy, Drama, Horror, and so forth. They’ve perfected this system with a bunch of algorithms that can determine what you’re most likely to watch (based on what you’ve watched before and how you rate other movies), and give you a personalized niche such as Cerebral Foreign Dramas, or Witty Buddy Comedies. So not only does Netflix itself play to the strengths of their target audience, but they offer an even more personalized level of service once you start watching. We’ll see even more of this targeted marketing in the future as they continue to purchase original programming such as the critically acclaimed House of Cards and the cult-favorite Arrested Development. Netflix knows their audience, they deliver a quality product, and they make it easy to get.

So what the heck do we do with this information? I’ve covered a lot of ground, and have yet to even scratch the surface on how we can begin to use this information to our advantage and market our own products. In the fifth, and final, part of this blog post we’ll look at why any of this information matters, and (finally!) what we can do with it to enhance our brands and stand out from the crowd.

Related

About @Midwest

@Midwest grew out of a series of meetings between various professionals in the Bloomington-Normal area to discuss the best practices of social media marketing.
Discover more about @Midwest and find out what the media has to say about us.